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This article is from the WSSF 2013AFRMA Rat & Mouse Tales news-magazine.

Critter Critiques

7084 Pelleted Paper® Bedding Review

By Karen Robbins

7084 Pelleted Paper® Bedding is a product from
Teklad. These pellets are made from pre-consumer recycled paper mixed
with some aspen hardwood sawdust as a pelleting aid. Since it is from
pre-consumer recycled paper, it does not contain bits of plastic,
string, or staples, have a high ink content (most has never been used
for printing; if it has, the ink is from soy ink so it will not turn
rodents gray like some other products), nor had any chemical de-inking
solvents used. This makes for an environmentally-friendly, safe,
clean, non-toxic product. It is also biodegradable, incinerable, and
has very low dust. It is produced in a sanitary plant with stringent
procedures which makes for a quality product. This was originally
designed as a non-contact bedding and cat litter but is now used as
contact bedding as well.

The Test Begins

I was looking forward to trying out this product as it is
a paper pellet mixed with aspen. I was hoping for the benefits of
both products—paper pellets don’t break down into a powder
and aspen has great odor control. This, however, didn’t meet
my expectations. While the labs found it superior in absorbency and
having excellent odor control, I didn’t find that in my testing.
While it doesn’t break down into a powder like straight aspen
pellets do, the odor control left a lot to be desired.

It just smells like paper when first opening the bag, not strong or
overpowering in any way which is one of the things I look for in beddings.
Other things I look for are odor control, amount of absorbency, and
the dust factor. Also, I don’t want it to color the animals tails
or fur which I have found with other products I’ve tried.

I did the majority of the testing on the rats as I was hoping to find
an alternative bedding to the existing paper pellets I currently use
under the aspen chips in the corners of the rat cages. Just a couple
days after placing it in most of the rat cages, the whole room smelled
of dirty cages which is not normally the case. At cleaning time most
of the cages looked clean (had clean areas), but smelled dirty or
had a strong smell.

There was no extra dust from using these pellets like I have found
with other products. Also, it did not turn the rats tails gray or
make the white areas on the rats look dirty.

I have found the aspen to be far and above the best to
use on mice in both odor control and moisture absorbency. Using the
7084 in several mouse cages in place of the aspen pellets underneath
the aspen shavings in the corners of the cages, the cages would vary
from smelling like paper, to some ammonia smell in the pee corners,
to some cages that wouldn’t be very dirty but would smell verymousey with very wet corners.

I found I was cleaning more often than normal just to keep the smell
away during the 8 weeks of testing.

Overall results:

smell of fresh product: good

no dust: good

not colorizing the critters: good

absorbency: not so good

odor control: not good

So based on the odor control and absorbency failing my tests, this
is one product that didn’t work in my situation and I won’t
be using. Each person needs to do a test for themselves to determine
what the results are for their situation (number of cages, number
and type of animals, if it is used in litter boxes instead of under
bedding in the whole cage, etc.) as they may find a different outcome.